[plug] next distro?

[Cameron Patrick]

Craig Ringer wrote:

> I find Fedora does the job very nicely for just that. FC1 anyway; FC2 
> seems to be only half-baked from what I've heard

I've heard that.  I just installed FC2 on a scratch partition at home
last night and was quite impressed.  Haven't played with it enough to
see what it's like for /real/ usage, but I'd imagine that its quirks
would annoy me and I'd have to rebuild a few things from source.  One
thing I noticed in 30 seconds of using it was that it didn't install
libsmbclient by default so printing to windows printers and accessing
windows shares was broken.

> The only things I've custom built on my FC1 systems are KDE3.2, 
> Ghoscript CVS, LittleCMS, and Scribus CVS. Pretty incredible compared to 
> my usual, where I begin to wonder why I don't dpkg --remove / rpm -e 
> most of the OS and just rebuilt it _all_.

Why don't you make your own RPMs?  On my Debian systems I have a few
custom-built debs that I like to use.  I can stick them in an apt
repository and install them easily from anywhere.  Presumably Fedora
can do something similar -- I mean, Debian Potato which introduced apt
is only four years old!

> Of course, YYMV, and many seem to consider Debian Sarge a viable 
> alternative.

(Your Y....... May Vary?)

It is, /but/ it will take some fiddling to get a usable system from
the default install sadly.  I should probably go and to a clean
install and file bugs on everything that appears to be broken...

> This seems much more reasonable to me than it did a while ago, as
> now it looks to have a chance of actually stabilising to release
> within a year ;-)

Indeed :-)

If you do want to install Sarge, it's probably easiest to use the new
beta debian installer:  http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
The beta4 installer works, but there have been a few nice improvements
in sid_d-i (the daily builds) so you might want to try that.  (It's
the "if you'd like something newer" link on the page above.)

Cameron.